by Trebor Scholz
Just returned from the British Isles and I am still thinking about what in fact happened at Open Congress. The event placed timely discourses around open source and free culture into the context of Tate Britain in London.
The attendees were much younger than those filling the halls of American or European media art festivals (but reputedly older than the predictable event audience in the city on the River Thames).
The organizers intended to facilitate a congress rather than a conference. They aimed for a break down of the audience-speaker divide. But in the case of the top-down architecture of the Clore Auditorium at the Tate the desired genuine interplay and role switching was hard to achieve. A stage remains a podium. The listeners in the auditorium remain pacified in the cinema-like dark. Smaller, informal workshops levelled the usual conference hierarchies much more successfully. The Seeds for Change workshop on rough consensus building in groups was useful. It added an activist perspective to the emerging field of ‘cooperation studies’ – a domain almost completely occupied by business analysts. The workshop demonstrated that thinking about groups, online or off, does not have to be in the service of the ebays and amazon.coms of this world. (They hardly need our help.)
The facilitators of Open Congress realised the limits of what Geert Lovink and I have called ‘panelism’. Who wants to hear an academic star read a paper (however brilliant it may be)? We can read the text online before the event! Open Congress was part of a series of linked events also including the World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures (WSFII), and Future Wireless. The idea of linked, parallel or sequential events is useful as people coming in from afar get rewarded with cultural intensity once they are over their jetlag. One of the events that followed was a Cybersalon talk by Gilberto Gil, the Brazilian cultural minister/singer/songwriter and open source proponent.
Prior to the congress, the facilitators organized a series of public meetings. As they pointed out, these gatherings were as formative for them as the actual event. The idea was to keep the day-to-day processes of the event organization transparent. On the Open Congress wiki visitors to the site could read how much money was available and who sponsored the effort. Things became a bit uneasy when contributors were asked to post their fee requests on the site. I appreciated the spirit behind their statement “You name your fee and we will tell you if we are willing to pay that for you”. Do we ask more, less or the same as the other guy? Conference economies are always a provocative topic.
In her compressed presentation, the media theorist and sociologist Tiziana Terranova joined Richard Stallman in his insistence on the difference between open source and free software. Terranova pointed to the trend of harnessing cultural production and sharing culture. To what extent can open infrastructures such as the internet support Manuel Castells’ ideas of boot-strapping, autonomy and self-organization?
McKenzie Wark read from his text 'A Hacker Manifesto' in which he argues for the centrality of the property question in discourses of openness. Felix Stalder correctly questioned the simplistic adaptation of open source principles by other spheres of culture. He emphasized that the free encyclopedia Wikipedia is swarming with factual mistakes. Stalder described Wikipedia as a model that requires significant numbers of users, which language spaces other than English do not offer. I was not able to go to many presentations that I would have loved to see because they were scheduled concurrently. This frequently happens at larger events. (It is a problem that is difficult to solve). Open Congress asserted questions about conference formats as much as it started to sort out some of issues of Free, Libre and Open Source Software; FLOSS, that is.
Brooklyn, 16 January 2006
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